Anomaly Defenders

The continuation of a time-tested franchise, Defenders flips the series’ structure on its head: you’re a human commander helping out a routed alien race. However, little has changed: it’s still a multi-channel tower-defence game with a slow start and a shallow learning curve.

Visually impressive, Anomaly Defenders relies on deeper strategy than most tower defence games. Genre veterans should play Hard mode, while casual players should go Medium to avoid boredom: easy is practically a joke. Hit Level 8 and the game shows its true colours, until then it’s little more than a tutorial.

Two or three hours in, you’ll easily understand each enemy type and how to counter it; your choice of towers becomes reflex-based, and your frantic tapping on Left Each enemy has its own strengths and weaknesses, but these are quickly learned Below The skill tree isn’t as in-depth as you’d like from a tower-defence game the laggy interface does little to retain your attention. There’s a scant choice of towers, and though each has the capacity to hold eight upgrades, lack of unique perks makes it all feel very formulaic and repetitive.

Defenders is the last installment of a series, proof of the law of diminishing returns. It’s by no means a bad full stop on the series, but Anomaly has certainly seen better days. At least Defenders is the prettiest developers 11bit has produced yet, though. iPad+ | iOS 5.0 | £2.99/$4.99 | v1.0.2 http://bit.ly/anomalydefios • Android | os 2.2 | $ 3.99 | v1.01 http://bit.ly/anomalydefand • You may also like the latest impossibly slim waterproof sony xperia z3 compact android tablet.